The follow-up call had gone unanswered for hours. During this time, the silo went dark. And then someone else picked up the line.
Donald coughed into his handkerchief and read this unusual exchange. The officer on duty claimed the respondent sounded young. It was a male, not a shadow or the head, and he had asked a flurry of questions. One stood out to Donald. The person in seventeen, with only minutes left to live, had asked what was going on down on level forty.
Level forty. Donald didn’t need to grab a schematic to check—he had designed the facilities. He knew every level like the back of his hand. Level forty was a mixed-use level with half to housing, a quarter to light agriculture, the rest to commercial. What could be going on down there? And why would this person, who must’ve been at the limits of survival, care?
He read the exchange again. It almost sounded as though the young man’s last contact had been with level forty, as if he’d just spoken with them. Maybe he’d come from down there? It was only six levels away. Donald imagined a frightened boy storming up the stairwell with thousands of others. News of an opened airlock, of death below, people chasing upward. This young man gets to level thirty-four, and the crush of people is too much. IT has already emptied. He finds his way into the server room—
No. Donald shook his head. That wasn’t right. None of that felt right. What was it about this that nagged him?
It was the blackout. Donald felt a chill run up his spine. It was the number forty. It was the silo, not the level. The report trembled in his hands. He wanted to jump up and pace the cafeteria, but all he had was the germ of a connection, the hint of an outline. He fought to connect the dots before the ideas melted away, disturbed by a rush of adrenalin.
It was Silo Forty he had spoken with. The boy had found himself at the back of seventeen’s comm station. He didn’t know it was a silo calling at all. That would be why he’d called it a level and had wondered what was happening down there. This blackout, this lack of contact, it was just like the silos Anna had been working on.
Anna—
Donald thought about the note she had left, asking Thurman to wake her. She was asleep below. She would know what to do. She should’ve been woken and put in charge, not him. He gathered the reports and papers and put them back into the proper folders. Workers were beginning to arrive from the lifts. The smell of reconstituted eggs floated out from the kitchen, the swinging doors pumping the aroma with the traffic of the bustling food staff, but Donald had forgotten his hunger.
He glanced up at the wallscreen. Would anyone on shift right now know of Silo Forty? Maybe not. They wouldn’t have made the same connection. Thurman and the others had kept the outbreak a secret, didn’t want to cause a panic. But what if Silo Forty was still out there? What if they’d contacted seventeen? Anna said the master system had been hacked, that Silo Forty had hacked them. They had cut several facilities off from Silo One before Anna and Thurman had been woken to terminate them all. But what if they hadn’t? What if this Silo Seventeen wasn’t destroyed? What if it was still there, and this cleaner had stumbled into the bowl to find—
Donald had a sudden urge to go see for himself, to stroll outside and dash up to the top of the hill, suit be damned. He left the wallscreen and headed toward the airlock.
Perhaps he would need to wake Anna, just as Thurman had. He could set her up in the armory. There was a blueprint for doing this from his last shift, only he didn’t have anyone he could trust to help. He didn’t know the first thing about waking people up. But he was in charge, right? He could demand to know.
He left the cafeteria and approached the silo’s airlock, that great yellow door to the open world beyond. The outside wasn’t as bad as he had been led to believe. Unless he was simply immune. There were machines in his blood that kept him stitched up when he was frozen. Perhaps they had kept him alive out there. He approached the inner airlock door and peered through the small porthole. The memory of being in there struck him with sudden violence. He tucked the two folders under his elbow and rubbed his arm where the needle had bitten into his flesh long ago, putting him to sleep. What was out there? The light spilling through the holding cell bars flickered as a dust cloud passed, and Donald realized how strange it was that they had a wallscreen in Silo One. The people here knew what they’d done to the world. Why did they need to see the ruin they’d left behind?
Unless—
Unless the purpose was the same as for the other silos. Unless it was to keep them from going outside, a haunting reminder that the planet was not safe for them. But what did they really know beyond the silos? And how could a man hope to see for himself?
74
It took a few days of planning and building up the nerve for Donald to make the request, and a few days more for Dr. Wilson to schedule an appointment. During that time he told Eren about his suspicions of Silo Forty’s involvement. The flurry of activity launched by this simple guess quickly consumed the silo. Donald signed off on a requisition for a bombing run, even though he didn’t quite understand what he was signing. Little-used levels of the silo—levels familiar to Donald from before—were reawakened. Days later, he didn’t feel the rumble or the ground shake, but others claimed to have. All he found was that a new layer of dust had settled over his things, shaken loose from the ceiling.
The day of his meeting with Dr. Wilson, he stole down to the main cryopod floor to test his code. He still didn’t fully trust the disguise offered by his loose overalls and the badge with someone else’s name on it. Just the day before, he had seen someone in the gym he thought he recognized from his first shift. It put him in the habit of slinking instead of strutting. And so he shuffled down the hall of frozen bodies and entered his code into the keypad warily. He expected red lights and warning buzzes. Instead, the light above the Emergency Personnel label flashed green, and the lock clanked. Donald glanced down the hall to see if anyone was watching as he pulled the door open and slipped inside.
The little-used cryochamber was a fraction of the size of the others and only one level deep. Standing inside the door, Donald could picture how the main deep freeze wrapped around this much smaller room. This was a mere bump along great walls that stretched nearly out of sight. And yet it contained something far more precious. To him, anyway.
He picked his way through the pods and peeked in at the frozen faces. It was difficult to remember being there with Thurman on his previous shift, hard to recall the exact spot, but he eventually found her. He checked the small screen and remembered thinking it didn’t matter what her name was, saw that there wasn’t one assigned. Just a number.
“Hey, Sis.”
His fingertips sang against the glass as he rubbed the frost away. He recalled their parents with sadness. He wondered how much Charlotte knew of this place and Thurman’s plans before she came here. He hoped nothing. He liked to think her less culpable than him.
Seeing her brought back memories of her visit to DC. She had wasted a precious furlough on campaigning for Thurman and seeing her brother. Charlotte had given him a hard time when she found out he’d lived in DC for two years and hadn’t been to any of the museums. It didn’t matter how busy he was, she’d said. It was unforgivable. “They’re free,” she told him, as if that were reason enough.